Captive Films swept the Cinesol 4th Annual 36 Hour Film Race event with “Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores” which won a total of five awards including Best Writing, Best Ensemble, Best Credits Sequence, Audience Favorite and Best Film.

The members of Orange Media, which was unable to participate this year, are thrilled to have joined forces with Captive Films to take home such a prestigious set of awards. And also congratulations to all the teams who competed and we’ll see you at the starting line next year!

Pictured (left to right): Rommel Garza, Sergio Tovar, Jay Juarez, Jose Lomas, Hernan Cortez, Jason R. Johnston, Ivan Buenrostro, Bertha Gonzalez, Gabriel Ramirez, Erick Treviño, Alyssa Salas, Gerardo Salinas, Mark Rodriguez and Edward Cordero.

Due to a miss-communication, Orange Media was late to the registration period for the Cinesol 4th Annual 36 Hour Film Race this weekend and opted not to participate. Erick Treviño, president of Orange Media, and the voluntary members of the defunct team voted to continue participation by assisting another team. All of the ex-Orange team members were excited to help Captive Films (Jose Lomas, Aisa Showery and Gerardo Salinas) with the production of their motion picture “Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores”, a fun action-adventure short film about a Mexican A-Team hired to rescue a man’s kidnapped daughter from a dangerous cartel.

With every Cinesol film race comes script variables which must be included in any production to ensure legal participation. This year’s requirements were: genre (action-adventure), character (mariachi), location (bakery), prop (cape) and dialogue (“this is going on my blog”).

Principal photography began after 4am Saturday and wrapped after 5pm. Second unit photography happened after 6pm and wrapped before 8pm. Foley was captured around 2am Sunday morning as the final edit sweetening and music production and recording was happening. I came on board the show as cinematographer (credited as director of photography) with 1st AC Rob Liendo who rocked the joint consistently well throughout principal photography. Rob’s professionalism and awesomeness kept the shooting efficient and we got the show done on time and on budget. I’ve had camera assistants and grips and volunteers who were happy to help, but I’ve never had a “1st AC” before and Rob was a pro and kicked ass so a big thanks to him for coming down from Pennsylvania to volunteer his time.

Also a big thanks to Sergio Tovar, Ivan Buenrostro, Mark Rodriguez and Pepe Revilla who are always happy to help camera and electrical but were also able to break out and have roles in the cast this year, while still managing to find time to help Rob roll cables, set up lights and dolly. I’m thankful for all these guys volunteering their time to play these dual roles as efficiently and gracefully as they always do.

“Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores” is directed by Jose Lomas and written by Bertha Gonzalez. Produced by Aisa Showery and Gerardo Salinas. Executive Producers are Erick Treviño and Edward Cordero. Gibby Ramirez is the editor with assistant George Garcia. The killer original music score was written and performed by Jay Juarez, Rommel Garza and Erick Treviño who let me peter around with the MIDI accordion. “Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores” stars Pedro Garcia, Ivan Buenrostro, George Magee, Gerardo Salinas, Sergio Tovar, Jorge Damm, Erick Treviño, Alyssa Salas and Hernan Cortez.

“Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores” is intended to premier at the 4th Annual 36 Hour Film Race results program during the Cinesol Film Festival September 13, 2009 at the TSTC Student Theater in Harlingen, TX. “Sex, Trafficking and Luchadores” would probably be rated R for language and violence.

I will post the film here with HD links to Vimeo and YouTube after the results of the film race next week.

I just got home from the after party celebrating our short film Finding Cochino and its sweep at the 36 Hour Film Race awards ceremony at CineSol Film Festival last night.

We won a total of five awards including a special award they created specifically for Eric Salazar. Here they are:

Best Film – Finding Cochino
Audience Favorite – Finding Cochino
Best Supporting Actor, Male – Eric Salazar
Best Director, Comedy – Edward Cordero
Best Editing – Gibby Ramirez

I’m stoked, man! I didn’t win for cinematography but that’s ok considering we won best film and audience favorite…that pretty much means we all kicked ass. This of course means we’ll need to crank it up again next year, but we’ll be ready.

Edward Cordero and myself, the director and cinematographer of Finding Cochino, respectively, were interviewed last night by local Spanish news station KNVO-TV 48 for their entertainment segment with Gaby Gutierrez. The interview was about our participation in the 36 Hour Film Race and the future of Rio Grande Valley film-makers in general.

Here’s what it looked like:

The film shown during the interview is called Dead End and was recorded off of YouTube for the news story by shooting a computer monitor. Dead End was produced by Visual Works Entertainment for the 2007 Cinesol 36 Hour Film Race. I think it won the audience favorite award and an award for special effects.

I’m home. We wrapped principal and pickup photography Saturday at 7:30pm. After watching a few rough cuts, I went home at 9:30. Sometime around 4:15am Eric called to get me back in the studio so I could record the voice-over for the narrator of our short film. I remained at the studio at Orange Media until a little after 10am Sunday, after Eric and Edward had returned from dropping off the finished film in Harlingen. It’s nearly noon and I’m very, very tired. I can’t wait to see how well we do at the results presentation and screening next Saturday during the CineSol film festival.

I’ll make our entry available to watch online as soon as the rules of the competition allow me to do so.

Cheers!

On August 29th the 2008 CineSol 36 Hour Film Race will begin and Orange Media will be competing once again. Last year I edited the ten minute horror short film Gibby directed called The End.

This time, however, with Edward at the helm, they’ve asked me to serve as Director of Photography. It will be my responsibility to give whatever story we wind up creating its look and feel; its mood. I’ve asked the producers if we could get permission from the TV station where we work to borrow the big, heavy Panasonic P2 ENG cameras instead of the prosumer camcorders we’ve used before. The reason is I find the 2/3″ cameras have lower noise, better light sensitivity, more efficient control layout, truer colors and a higher dynamic range over the prosumer 1/3″ camcorders. Also, because of their greater weight and size, the big ENG cameras are sturdier and not as prone to inadvertent shake. Besides, bystanders don’t take you seriously when your camera can be held comfortably in one hand.

I’m not going to know which genre we are to work in until the 29th. The producers want premade storylines for each of the probable genres so we already have something thought out. I don’t know how well this will work out since it pretty much didn’t last year. Too much thought, too much development and too much arguement gave us the weak entry we submitted last year. The infighting has already begun as our producer/writers can’t seem to come up with anything they all like.

Too many cooks in the kitchen.

I think all this deliberation is unnecessary: I proved earlier in the week that one can come up with a fun and doable story given a set of random required variables in about five minutes, plus a rewrite.

While at lunch I asked Mariano to come up with a set of variables like the ones we might receive from the film race, where each item must be included in the film at least once. He came up with this:

Genre: romance
Location: hardware store
Prop: fishing net
Character: lawyer
Dialogue: “I’m getting too old for this.”

What can you come up with?

I immediately pondered the story of Lucas Able: a regular guy enjoying his weekend when his wife Jill tasks him with fixing the kitchen counter. Not having a simple hammer he visits the local HARDWARE STORE and buys the most amazing hammer he’s ever seen. In fact, after using the hammer to fix the counter, Lucas falls in love with it.

Jill grows suspicious of her generally lazy husband as he proceeds to “fix” everything in the house, obsessed with his new found affair. Jealous, Jill calls her friend Cathy, a LAWYER, seeking legal advice: Jill wants to know if it is against the law to murder a tool. Cathy assures her that you cannot kill a stupid innanimate object and the law does not recognize tooltricide as being unlawful. After hanging up, Cathy mutters “I’M GETTING TOO OLD FOR THIS” and comforts her stapler, admitting that she “didn’t mean you.”

The ROMANCE between Lucas and his hammer is made all too clear as Jill walks in on the couple’s secret romantic dinner together. In a rage, Jill kidnaps the hammer and a car chase ensues. Jill arrives with the hammer at an ocean jetty littered with fisherman, having every intent of releasing it to a watery grave when Lucas arrives and attempts to reason with her. Jill just wants to work things out with her estranged husband but in an act of weakness throws the hammer toward the ocean. Acting quickly, Lucas grabs a nearby FISHING NET and uses it to rescue his hammer as Jill trips and also begins to fall but then grabs onto the hammer as Lucas pulls them both to safety, collapsing into each other. “We can work this out,” assures Lucas.

That night, with candles and empty glasses of wine about the room, Lucas and Jill lay in bed together smiling. “See, honey? I told you we could work this out” says Lucas as both he and Jill begin to caress each other…and the hammer snuggling between them.

The end.

I came up with that in five minutes while munching on a Sonic burger. You need three actors, the items listed, two cars, a house (where a room can double as the lawyer’s office or home) and there’s an ocean jetty not an hour away from my location. Completely doable, fun and mildly entertaining with some funny action and a gentle twist at the end.

I like it so much I’ll probably want to make it after the film race is over.

All I’m saying is that this over planning and over thinking is a waste of creative energy that should be focused on the day of the event and is what killed us last year. They’re trying so hard to be perfect that they can’t have fun with the project and the result will likely be as soulless as The End was last year.

Because of this I am taking no part in the writers meetings, only contributing to the technical and artistic discussions of the coming film. Personally, I don’t care what story we wind up doing. I just want the director to tell me what the point of the story is and what mood he wants to convey and I will take it from there…hopefully knocking it out of the park, so to speak.